I had the pleasure of participating in the “This is My City” workshop in this summer. It was organized by Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carriço, Belgian and Portuguese architects working out of Beijing, and Nuno Soares, a local architect in Macau. The premise was to “explore Macau’s urban landscape by investigating the relation between the cultural/media imaginaries and the concrete conditions of the everyday.” Practically speaking, this involved surveying the city from a few hand picked vantage points and then a second day spent producing designs that envisioned possible directions for Macau’s future development.

It was nice being a tourist again in the city that has become my home over the past year. The rapid development and confined geography of Macau, together with the vernacular architecture of the gaming industry certainly make for a unique urban environment.

Below is a frame from a short animation I rendered for the exhibit and a speculative design of Macau’s future development. Their value obviously lays more in the attention they bring to their surrounding than any real architectural value.
Images from the exhibition can be found here